#highered news as contemporary intellectual history—Meranze's Latest

…re-posted from Remaking the University. Back when Michael Meranze (history, UCLA) blogged a weekly links post, I often reblogged it. He still blogs regularly, but Latest Links is now a feature on the sidebar with no rss feed. Links encompass the education spectrum but from a California perspective, welcome and sometimes short in national higher ed coverage. 

PS Don't miss his latest, "The New Brutalism in Higher Ed" (9/4/14), building on LRB editor Marina Warners' Diary column in London Review of Books. Read both. Meranze, master of the killer close, brings the "new brutalism" of UK higher ed back to our own shores:

Warner began her account by describing the visit of a friend from California who noticed that the library (from the 1960s) had been built in the style of the "new brutalism" (Think of most old UC or CSU buildings). But as Warner herself notes, "new brutalism in academia was taking on another meaning."  Although it has happened with ruthless ideological will in England, it is not an alien story to the US.  Indeed, what has happened over the last few years under David Cameron is really just a fast-forward version of what has been going on in the US more slowly and in less centralized fashion. We are in the midst of our own new brutalism.  Although not as centrally directed we have been witnessing it for years: the recent intrusions by governing boards at the Universities of Illinois, Kansas, and Virginia; the shuttering of small language departments; the dramatic rise in tuition at public universities; increasing student/faculty ratios; ever growing reliance on adjuncts; cuts in Federal support for scholarly research; and our own, albeit less developed, auditing system.  In England, the transition occurred with such speed as to catch most people off-guard (despite the efforts of individuals like Stefan Collini, Andrew McGettigan, or the Campaign for the Public University).  But we have no excuse.This is the time to master the details to be able to oppose the systems being put into place on campuses across the country. [emphasis added]

Michael Meranze's Latest Links

Reading Room: the fault lines of american #highered « #Omnivore @bookforum

…another outstanding Omnivore collection of briefly annotated higher education links that I could not decide where to trim so kept them all. All of the topics are familiar and a number of the links will be too, but there are also links I don't recall seeing shared around the adjunct corner of social media. The first chunk is admin related; the next, institution and profession; and the final two about, adjuncts, grad school, academic labor and the job market.

From the New York Times Magazine, Michael Sokolove on the trials of Graham Spanier, Penn State’s ousted president. The coup that failed: Talbot Brewer on how the near-sacking of a university president exposed the fault lines of American higher education. Avoiding disastrous presidencies: Ry Rivard reviews  Presidencies Derailed: Why University Leaders Fail and How to Prevent It by Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, Gerald B. Kauvar and E. Grady Bogue. 

There’s the war on college, and then there’s Rick Perry’s war on the University of Texas. Nicholas Lemann on the soul of the research university. From Polymath, a special issue on being a professor (and part 2). The teaching class: Rachel Riederer on how teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone paying tuition should care. What do college professors do all day? Lisa Wade investigates. 

universities in particular

…follow up to "what bureaucracies stand for:" this round is about universities, academic culture and markets. It is not specifically about contingent academic labor, elephant subtext in the room even so. Read through that lens.

From UN Chronicle, a special issue on higher education. Clifford Tan Kuan Lu, Nottingham:  Do University Rankings Matter for Growth? Alexandre Afonso (King's College): How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang.

Ominvore #ReadingRoom: not your dad's academy

…waiting for the #Adjunct Town Hall witching hour to arrive, rummaging through the feed reader's daily (and older catch). Many we've read recently and were not new even then. 

Increasingly more stories make it out of the Ivory Silo™ niches of journals and higher ed media. Omnivore casts its nets widely: its briefly annotated, themed collections open a two-way window on academic culture in the media, lay bare higher ed "media creep." 


I'm still waiting for coverage to include adjunct generated media. Until then, we do that for ourselves.

David A. Reidy (Tennessee): Social Justice, the University, and the Temptation to Mission Creep. From Class, Race, and Corporate Power, Thomas Breslin (FIU): Race, Class and the Promise of the Public University; and Ronald W. Cox (FIU): The Corporatization of Higher Education. Noam Chomsky on the death of American universities: As universities move towards a corporate business model, precarity is being imposed by force....The Wal-Mart-ization of higher education: Keith Hoeller on how young professors are getting screwed.... 

Not your dad's academy: Nick Kristof is wrong — professors are more relevant, accessible, and tech-savvy than ever before.  

Read the rest of not your dad's academy at Book Forum's Omnivore

the university & its challenges

Welcome to the Reading Room, briefly annotated links rounding up the usual higher ed suspects. Institutional pubs, UK and US press, journals and magazines weigh in on university culture, online education, open access, academic publishing, race, gender, movies, adjuncts (thank you, Omnivore!), graduate school, grim futures (so what else is new?) and so on...

Leon Botstein (Bard): Resisting Complacency, Fear, and the Philistine: The University and Its Challenges, The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2013. From Notre Dame Magazine, a special issue: Is college worth it? Male academics rarely suffer more than a bit of rudeness, but women have it far worse, according to Luke Brunning. 

the university as we know it?

…briefly annotated articles from diverse sources (e.g. not just higher ed media) on academic news, trends and culture shamelessly reblogged from Book Forum's blog Omnivore (for the omnivorous reader, part of the academic job description, n'est-ce pas?). Neither unfamiliar topics nor adjuncts either today. Never disappointing, other themed collections cover politics, science, history, contemporary culture, philosophy, sundry topics from the Zeitgeist and more.  perhaps a fresh perspective or so. Still, perhaps someone among us should drop Book Forum a thoughtful note about Omnivore's shameless neglect of the academic precariat? I'm game. Are you? 

Eric Royal Lybeck (Cambridge): The Ideological Organization of University Systems: A Theoretical Framework. From The American Scholar, how to do what you do? Paula Marantz Cohen on how the life of a professor isn’t what it used to be. Smart, poor kids are applying to the wrong colleges: How an information mismatch is costing America’s best colleges 20,000 low-income students every year. Jordan Weissmann on how Washington could make college tuition free (without spending a penny more on education).

The online university of spam: Andrew Leonard on how a bizarre email from BachelorsDegreeOnline.com exposed the sleazy side of for-profit college recruitment. Does the rise of the “massive open online course” spell the end of the university as we know it? Keith Devlin on MOOCs and the problem with instructional videos. From TNR, will online education dampen the college experience?

the university as we know it? - bookforum.com / omnivore

no sanctuary in the ivory tower

Jonathan Olson (FSU): The Quest for Legitimacy: American Pentecostal Scholars and the Quandaries of Academic Pursuit. From Journalist’s Resource, a research roundup on affirmative action in university admissions. Price of a bad review: A university librarian finds himself sued for questioning the quality of an academic press. Blow up Media Studies: Emma Park reviews Blow Up the Humanities by Toby Miller. 

No sanctuary in the ivory tower: Why didn’t MIT defend Aaron Swartz? Chris Lehmann investigates. 

Nicole Allan and Derek Thompson on the myth of the student-loan crisis: Are rising debt levels really a cause for national panic? The Dean of Corruption: Cecilia Chang, the St. John’s fund-raiser who committed suicide after her epic fraud was exposed, tried to keep her superiors happy with gifts of watches, vacations, custom suits, and fine wine — it worked, for a while.

no sanctuary in the ivory tower - bookforum.com / omnivore

world university

…around the world & back again, money talks in all languages (the ultimate koine), online courses = global access but what outcomes? 

Abdulla Galadari (MIT): World University: Bringing Higher Education Closer to Humanity. From china.org, ranking of rich alumni triggers debate: The compiler of a controversial list of rich alumni said the ranking helps promote entrepreneurial education at universities. Michele Lamont and Anna Sun on how China's elite universities will have to change. A new Russian technical university has high aspirations. 

On Her Majesty's scholarly service: For centuries Regius chairs were the gift of kings, tools of statecraft and the preserve of ancient universities — but that has changed, most recently with the addition of 12 new professorships, as Richard J. Evans relates. From Roar, Thomas Friedman may praise the emancipatory potential of online university courses, but are they really capable of producing more than docile workers?

world university - bookforum.com / omnivore

academe on the brink

…a stroll through academic culture & how it looks outside the Ivory Silo™ as well as from the inside…Sunday reading, time enough another day for the difficult, weighty and unpleasantly tangled plus more agreeable relevant professional announcements ~ more on 

• IRS weighing in on ACA and PTF workload (cadres of the unhappy no matter how it goes), 
• Green River CC intra-union conflict (oh noes, not again, but yes: uglier, more divisive, increasingly less conducive to civil discourse + gratuitous sideswipes at NFM), 
• @FutureofHE working papers on funding higher ed, 
• rounding off with calls for papers and upcoming conferences with contingent faculty sessions, even whole conferences just for us. 

So read on and enjoy. I'll do the same...

a straight path into academia

…more Omnivore, a selection of briefly annotated links about academia…highly readable equivalent of "Calgon take me away" for higher ed bloggers. Yes, wedo have our own news and plenty of it: from a new adjunct pages; an important new education column that we hope to feature regularly; chapter news; the impending arrival/revival of the NFM Newsletter; a new installment in the saga of Green River intra-union conflicts ~ to the saga's chronicler working on a new article about the New Faculty Majority (presumably our Foundation  as well). All sufficient unto the morrow, a new day...

From the Los Angeles Review of Books, the academy in peril: A symposium on Blow Up the Humanities by Toby Miller (and more).

Reading Room: Omnivore's Choice

…sans explanatory or exculpatory head note of substance, a bit dated  (the last one was more recent). Trying to get back on daily post regimen (bless you Bill and Alan), resorting to working my way through hitherto neglected drafts. Joe latest COCAL Updates were on the schedule for today, but they take rather a bit of reformatting and link checking and I passed my coherence timeline before getting to them. Tomorrow maybe. Also simmering: a piece on injustices and not forgetting them when they drop below the fold or off the monitor. Looking after and calling attention to individual injustices matters as much if not more than surveys, participating in studies, conferences and strategic alliances. Save a life and save the world. 

From THES, Alan Ryan on the faith in education that inspired “Great Books” collections. From Slate, which pop culture property do academics study the most? Bound for glory: A look at academic terms misused and overused in popular vernacular. From TLS, a review of Debates in the Digital Humanities. 

Reading Room: Patterns in Academia

Actions. Protests. Campaigns Occupations. Summits. Conferences. Conventions. You know the boundaries are blurring when cops pepper spray not Berkeley but UC Davis (the 2nd whitest UC campus in the system) students and there is a movement to Occupy MLA, about which most of the conversations take place on Twitter. You doubt? Then search and follow the OccupyMLA or OMLA with or without hashtags. See for yourself. 


Change and transgression are in the air. So why am I posting a collection on annotated links from a book blog? Easy... we need intel from multiple perspectives, not just the usual academic media, a few blogs written by academics and mainstream media. It's also a change of pace. We need that too

Cathrine Hasse and Stine Trentemoller (Academia): Cultural Work Place Patterns in Academia. Rex J. Pjesky (West Texs A&M) and Daniel Sutter (Troy): Does the Lack of a Profit Motive Affect Hiring in Academe? Evidence from the Market for Lawyers....

around a university

Swerve and take a brief break from Academe's mean streets. The Grove as whiteboard jungle seems out of character until I remember Athena's less than scholarly weakness for hot-blooded warriors. These shady streets are jumping and jiving with teach-ins, demonstrations, protests, March Actions to Defend Public Education, an epidemic of toxic House Bills, Wisconsin shenanigans, Washington union enforcers, inappropriate teaching overloads, collective bargaining fighting for its life, occasional triumphant negotiations, dangerous memes, academic mobbing, scapegoating, and more of the same, seemingly without end.

 

From a conference on "The University We Are For", James Clifford on the Greater Humanities. After shootings in Arizona and at Virginia Tech, how can colleges know when, and in what way, to intervene in a troubled student's life? Live like a grad student forever: Oxford academic Toby Ord recommends living on as little as you can and giving away the rest. The rise of clickers is starting to change how college professors run their classrooms. No talking in class: Campus liberals sacrificed free expression on the altar of political correctness. 

Should computer “languages” qualify as foreign languages for Ph.D.s? It is worthwhile to pause and ask why so many educators are committed to the suspension of religious identity in the classroom. Now you see it, now you don't: Why journals need to rethink retractions. Does Harvard's "affirmative action for the affluent" screw the proles? David Leonhardt revisits the value of elite colleges. An interview with Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman, authors of Why Does College Cost So Much? 

The Useless University: The ancient tradition of pursuing knowledge for its own sake is slowly, quietly making a comeback. A look at how online courses are still lacking that third dimension. The question of what can be taught or what cannot is an intriguing one, especially around a university. A review of Lessons Learned: Reflections of a University President by William G Bowen.

via Omnivore, the Bookforum blog

The expression comes from the akademeia, just outside ancient Athens, where the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning. The sacred space, dedicated to the goddess of wisdom, Athena, had formerly been an olive grove, hence the expression "the groves of Academe"... and all the out of date but still longed for associations that go with it.

Posted via email from Academentia